Learning as territoriality: the political ecology of education in the Brazilian landless workers’ movement

Abstract

In this contribution, I explore the importance of agroecological education in the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). I analyze how certain MST educational programs are based in a critical place-based pedagogy. This type of pedagogy can serve as a form of territoriality, influencing individuals’ interactions with the land. Drawing upon a political ecology of education perspective, I conclude that MST educators can serve as Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’, by using a critical pedagogy of place as a form of territoriality to: (1) create a conception of place that is not discrete, but instead relational, and (2) advocate counter-hegemonic land usage.

Keywords:

• Landless Workers’ Movement
• critical pedagogy of place
• political ecology of education
• territoriality
• Gramsci
• organic intellectual

Notes

¹I use the phrase ‘educator-students’ because the individuals I follow in this research are both educators, working as teachers in a primary school within an MST settlement, and students in a graduate certificate program.

²A voluminous scholarship exists on the MST, its origination and its complicated relation to the Brazilian state. See Branford and Rocha (2002), Wright and Wolford (2003) and Wolford (2010) for key perspectives.

³All names used in this paper are pseudonyms in order to protect individuals’ identities.

⁴Perhaps as a result of his own lack of sustained focus on the peasantry, or the difficulty of extracting a coherent narrative from his Peasant notebooks, Gramscian scholars tend to focus on his writings about the industrial working class in comparison with the peasantry (Arnold 1984); but see Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: towards an intellectual biography for a critical analysis of this neglect, and Davis's (1979) Gramsci and Italy's passive revolution for a consideration of how the peasant problem is interconnected with his larger corpus of ideas.

⁵Gramsci's concepts have been applied to peasant groups in diverse international contexts. Feierman (1990) translates Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual to rural Tanzania, exploring the formation of peasant intellectuals. Karriem (2009) draws on a Gramscian approach to understand the interplay between space, ecology and politics in the Brazilian MST.

⁶As I discuss below, educators do not always fulfill this role as intended.

⁷Although Edison describes these internal politics as geographical, not all agree. Salete Campigotto, who is known as the first educator of the MST, indicated in a personal communication to MST education scholar Rebecca Tarlau that whether a teacher is from the MST community, or not, is not important. According to Campigotto, some teachers born in MST settlements will refuse to use the movement's pedagogy, and some teachers from outside the community will become the biggest activists. Therefore, the MST should try to engage with all teachers equally. Following Campigotto, one's ‘place’ (or where they come from) does not necessarily translate to how they defend or do not defend counter-hegemony in a particular territory.

Additional information

David Meek (PhD University of Georgia, 2014) is an environmental anthropologist, critical geographer and education scholar with an area specialization in Brazil. Professor Meek theoretically grounds his research in a synthesis of political ecology, critical pedagogy and place-based education. His interests include sustainable agriculture, social movements and environmental education. Meek's past research focused on the relationships between public policies, economic incentives and educational processes within an agrarian reform settlement in the Brazilian Amazon. In a series of publications currently under review, he has begun advancing a theoretical framework of the political ecology of education. This perspective illuminates how the reciprocal relations between political economic forces and pedagogical opportunities – from tacit to formal learning – affect the production, dissemination and contestation of environmental knowledge at various interconnected scales.